Micro Focus Service Manager Reviews

We implement some modules of this solution for our clients, mostly we did the integrations with the MF PPM. They are a medium-size development that focuses on a particular functionality.

It's flexible in terms of configuration and making changes. It can adapt to any process in the organization. It can be customized.

It's a new version with a fresh interface and incident management. The SMAX is the most recent that I remember and behind that is the smart service, it's a smart search when entering the system, it automatically recognizes an incident, takes a screenshot and opens a ticket. It's nice progress made to the user interface and incident management.

The codeless configuration is more simplified. Most of the customer's requirements can be done without coding, it's simple and very quick.

It has nice charts.

The reporting is not very strong. it can be improved. Customers need to combine different data from different sources to the same report, but it's quite difficult to do. You have to do it with many different versions.

With the new version moving toward the codeless configuration is good, but it's losing flexibility. There should be a larger selection of configuration tools made available to allow some parts of coding to be codeless and others allowing you to make some coding for business rules and workflow. You need some coding ability and functionality. It is difficult to find a customer who doesn't want to make any kind of customizations. It comes with many limits making it very difficult especially with on-premises customers.

I like the support but they could improve.

In the next release, I would like to see improvements made to reporting and the dashboard. Also, I would like to see the configuration simplified without losing flexibility. The best model that I have seen was with PPM where you can provide some coding with flexibility allowing you to configure to the customer's requirements but having limitations at the same time, but they are meaningful limitations that are easy to negotiate with the customer explaining that it is to prevent it from being a completely customized tool that will be very difficult to maintain, upgrade and update the versions. I would like to see a balance between the two. Flexibility plus simplifying the configuration.

I have been familiar with this solution since 2013. We work with this solution based on the customer's needs. It was periodically job and experiance until 2018.

There are always some amount of known issues in any tool, but I can conclude that the solution is stable, as long as all hardware and software recommendations and requirements are met. There were between one to two hundred employees in operating.

I have contacted the technical support team. We had open tickets with them, especially with the last year.

The technical support is ok, we have dealt with them for many years.

I would rate them a seven out of ten.

It's quite straightforward.

It only took one day to deploy for our testing purposes, but for customers, it can take anywhere from one to three days to ensure that all of the technical requirements are met. 

We implemented it ourselves.

I would recommend this solution. It's a classic with an operating system that can easily adapt and be implemented.

70 to 80% of the time with different cases the customer's requirements can be met.

The customer can start to implement the incident management with just one post. if you feel that you want to add more, you can add the change management, it can be implemented step by step.

There is always a place for improvement.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for incident management, program management, as well as for change, release and configuration management. 

It's quite a complicated solution. The design has been revamped in terms of GUI. The current interface is quite easy to read. However, it's very much dependant on how everything is set up. Many people manage to have it properly set up with a reduced number of steps to create or to change or to close any other ticket. 

However, one of my latest customers decided to implement some items in very specific ways in terms of dealing with change management that is really bureaucratic but the way they implemented it with the tool was actually quite efficient. The modules were very utilitarian and it became like just clicking boxes. To track changes, track approvals or avoid any changes with support could be implemented in the publisher which made it quite efficient.

On certain implementations, it can be very difficult to customize and then very difficult to maintain as well. This is because it is quite a complex solution.

Users need to be very conscious of how they set up the solution in terms of how they propose and ultimately set up the end terminals to make it easy to use for end-users. 

The setup on past projects had been quite difficult for two reasons: the first is that it's quite a technical tool so it takes a lot to set it up and customize it. The other issue is that there's a lack of tool experts, which makes it even more difficult to set everything up properly.

The solution does not interface well with other products and is difficult to implement.

The entire system needs to be redesigned to help improve overall usability and design.

When you synchronize or perform a task for event management from external tools, you have issues of performance because synchronization can take four or six hours before there is a solution.

It's very hard for the end-user to customize items, but if they were able to, it would be easier for them to arrange specific views and reports that would be more relevant to them.

I started using the solution in 2008, when it was named Service Center. It's been about 20 years since I was first introduced to it.

It has really gained stability in the last few latest years. When I started working on it, I recall an implementation where there was an issue with stability. The customer had upgraded to Service Center from one version to another and something went wrong. They were unable to go back to the old version and then they were unable to resolve the issue. They were without any IT assistance for six weeks. It was very frustrating.

This was ten or twelve years ago, however, and they've made great gains since then. I've spent two years using the latest version of the product. We have been able to upgrade everything without any issue at all.

The solution is quite scalable. Some of our clients include some utility companies in France and some clients in the nuclear and electricity industry. It's a solution that can scale well for enterprises.

Although I don't contact technical support directly, I have clients that have. From a technical point of view, support is pretty skilled. The company makes sure they are generally experienced and competent.

The initial setup is really complex. Afterwards, it depends on the people that are handling the implementation. Some companies that are implementing the product have some pre-defined templates that happen to help to set it up quite easily and with few negative items for the end customer to deal with. I personally don't have any access to such tools for at least the past five years now so I don't know how easy it actually is if a user does have these predefined templates. The tool doesn't work out of the box. You really have to put effort in to get it working once you have installed it.

Deployment of the most recent version takes about four to six months. How many people needed to deploy the solution depends on the company and the setup. It could be anywhere from two to four people, but a company must ensure they are experts. You'll also need some additional resources for the server and the network, etc. You'll need to take into account also if you need to define the processes, etc. and agree to everything at the beginning of the project. I'd estimate a maximum amount of four people would be needed for a deployment.

We have a team that helps with customizing and onboarding new customers. We also have a subsidiary that is dedicated to implementing the tool for customers. 

I've been consulting with companies about using the solution and largely deal with the on-premises deployment model.

I'd advise others to really take their time and think about the specifications before they embark on implementation. They must be sure that the positions are implemented or not via their ITSM processes that are already in their company. 

To implement some features, it's possible to lose an entire year, so it's best to hire an expert to provide guidance and advice about what is feasible.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten. It's an improved rating since the last version. However, it still needs to be more user-friendly can could continue to improve its stability.

We mainly use this as a service-desk solution for receiving calls, issues, and requests from the end-users.

Its flexibility and ease of customization are its most valuable features.

Their end-user interface and technical support features could be improved.

I have been using this solution for 10 years.

Its stability is quite good.

Micro Focus Service Manager's scalability is quite good.

We have more than 10 of our clients using this solution.

In terms of their technical support, they are not great and not very bad. Their technical support should be improved.

The initial setup was not complex at all.

I would recommend Micro Focus Service Manager.

On a scale of 1 - 10, I'd rate this solution a 7.

• ITSM service processes
• The richness of supporting standards, such as ISO 20000.
  

We have inherited a customer base with Micro Focus Service Manager. It gives us better understanding and control of service management.

• Configuration options with very granular control parameters.
• Workflow support and ability to support events.

• Pure cloud-based native functionality is lacking.

• It lacks templates to support out-of-the-box best practices.
  

It's pretty well-structured in modules.

It's easier to roll it out within the company and to sustain the processes.

It needs good integration with the configuration database, that's lacking at the moment, It's not that good. 

It's very important to integrate also with other tools. They've shown the four suites that they are going to have in the future, so it's very nice. It's slim, but it needs a very good integration, and it needs a very good analysis and a relationship within the topic, so that you get the information for performance, quality, costs, and so on. 

The integration of all these topics and how they are interlinked, interconnected with each other, it's not that great at the moment.

It's more for tracking and documentation purposes, not that much for operation management purposes. You need to do a lot of customization to use it for operation management purposes.

It's stable.

Not that scalable. The functionalities still need to develop some, so that it's really scalable, and you can use it for operations management. 

It was, I think, a CA solution. SoftDirect, I think; there were several. It was a company decision to switch but I wasn't at the company at the time.

I wasn't at the time, but I think they were further considering the SoftDirect that they had. They had HPE and also another provider. There were three in the running.

It's mostly so reliable and has a lot of functionality. We're using a lot of HPE tools and we can do a lot with it. So, its functionality is the most valuable feature.

When I attended the conference, I just saw a presentation about the Containers part and am really looking forward to that, because installing a new version/upgrading is always a pain. I think that this could be a big improvement.

It, still, has a bit of more of improvement possibilities in the codeless part. But, I can see that they are working on it, so that's quite good as well.

I think there are still some improvement possibilities and flexibilities needed, but, overall, it's a good solution as it is right now.

I have been using this solution since 2011.

I started using this solution in 2011, it has improved a lot in the past years.

We have just installed Service Manager 9.41, the new version and I'm really glad about this version; it's really nice and is making me smile.

It has scaled mostly over the past few years, but I think it could be a bit more flexible in terms of how it scales and the upgrading aspect.

Sometimes, it takes a while to find the right person or to get a point over but mostly, the support is okay.

I'm in finance, so it's mostly the reliability part that is important while selecting a vendor. As a company, we are trying to be reliable to the outside world, so we need reliable suppliers that can support this ideology.

We are an organization with 45,000 assets. Service Manager gives us a single system where everything is centralized in one base. We can log onto the equipment so we know when the equipment is, for example, freezing in the live environment.

It's web-based so we don't need to buy the spoke. Just log into it and away you go.

The user interface is very clunky. It's only now beginning to be a web-based interface, but for now it's still very clunky.

It deploys without issue.

It's very stable, but that's part of its clunkiness.

It scales for our needs.

We have an HP on-site support contract, which is nice and easy.

Get it. It's a one-stop-shop solution.

A valuable feature for us is that we have an ordered way to handle all the cases that we can handle with the infrastructure.

We benefit as we can keep control of everything in the technical infrastructure that we are delivering to the business side of the organization.

It needs to be easier to use for the end users because one problem we had was that we are handling different kinds of cases. We use it person to person by phone. It's not so user friendly. If there was more ease of use, then people would use it more regularly.

We have recently built up a new data center. We are seeing a lot of actual technology and we are trying to implement the universal discovery and everything around the NCMDB in this new infrastructure that we have built. We had quite a lot of issues with stability and the quality of the product so far.

We are around 12,000 end users. Scalability is quite good. It's scalable enough. We have no problem with the scalability so far.

We have used the technical support and we have quite a lot of HPA people in place on site trying to help us solve different issues. It has been good after we have been in discussion a lot. Overall the technical support is good.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. I came in after they started the setup.

We are using ServiceNow for some facility management. It was easier to have a user-friendly interface from the beginning, but now when we use the service portal, it's catching up. It's close to the same usability as Service Now. As it stands, it's better than mediocre.

I don't use it as a technical person, but just as a regular user. It helps to register things, to see the changing parts, and to correlate incidents. I'm talking about Operations Bridge with automation. We also achieve a lot, such as deploying infrastructure, automating our daily routine tasks, and things like that.

I would like to see more connection to DevOps, but not in terms of deploying the suites, deploying the tool itself. Rather, I'm talking about DevOps and self-service for our customers so they can, as users, do something in our tool without getting too many rights or using the wrong options.

There should be some front desk provided or some options to let our users serve themselves, because we have about 5000 servers and 400 applications. Those applications are developing continuously with DevOps and that means that they release everything, every day. They need extra monitoring, extra automation, or some corrections.

Our service time-to-market is very long. We need to free them and let them do things by themselves in our tools.

Previously, I was an HPE consultant, so I was not only using these tools, but also developing and integrating them. If I start from developing, it has been around 10 years.

Stability is getting better. I’ll put it this way.

It's enterprise level, so it’s scalable. We do have some questions about deploying server automation globally, because we have integration with another part of our organization. It should be possible.

When support is dedicated, it works well.

I know that that at our site, almost every two years we go to events like Gartners to ask for additional advice. Choosing a vendor actually comes down to the ability to integrate and scale and be enterprise level. There are a lot of small tools. They are good at some point features, but when it comes to the global picture, then you need to have quite a lot. For instance, to contain the rights. We are not there yet.

Life cycle management is a drama. For almost every tool we have, it's a project for a couple of months to upgrade something to the next level. It's not next, next, finished. No way.

Most of the time it's the value it can provide, as long as you've got it properly mapped out. So the most important factor is being able to gather all the data into one place and then you can distribute that information across to other areas, and they can then benefit from it.

It's strong, there's no doubt about it. I wouldn't want to go replacing it with any of the other tools. There are enough other companies that have got similar tools. But once you've gone down the road of using the HP software, you would like to make sure you carry it on, even though there are certain things they still need to improve upon.

I think one area which is the most painful from my point of view is if you need to integrate a lot of the tools, and being able to make that a lot more seamless.

For instance your workflow could be - that's the name of the server, that's the IP address, go and communicate, sort it out, pass the data in between. Having to sit there and spend sometimes weeks, trying to get them integrated and properly operational is annoying.

We have been using the solution probably since about 2010.

It is pretty much stable. I mean, it's been long enough now to the point that there are still issues here and there, but the main product itself is strong enough, and it's decent enough to be able to make use of.

I think the hardest part sometimes is when you try to integrate with a lot of the other HP software tools. That's where the containment, being able to move to the new sort of ITS main model, will most probably help. But the initial thing is if you've got to get these different tools integrated, it can be a bit difficult.

You have to have an idea of what the size of your organization is to begin with. So if you think, "we're only small," and then you actually realize you're discovering an awful lot of continuous integrations, then you may need to expand it.

So in the main, you've got to have a decent understanding about your organization in the first place, then make sure you scale it properly. Then from there on it's pretty scalable.

Technical support is pretty good. I mean, whenever you've got an issue you can at least always raise an incident and then with that someone's always going to have a look at your support case, get back to you, and then be able to sort of work the problem out.

There are times where you don't always get a fix, and it's mainly because of the version that you're running, so you need to upgrade. Being able to upgrade every five minutes is not something which is an option. So you can get to that point where they say, "we've fixed it - it's in the latest release." Great, what do I do now?

Those challenges are the ones which are sometimes the biggest problem. It's not that you don't know it's not getting fixed, but it doesn't mean the fix will always necessarily come to you to actually be able to use.

Regarding setup, it depends on which tool.

UCMBD has become a lot more easy to set up and put in place. So perhaps for instance in the case of a Chinese Asset Manager, that would still be a little bit complex, trying to get it operational. Especially when you're trying to feed data between UCMBD and the Asset Manager. So it depends on what you're trying to do.

If you then need to connect it and whatever else, then you have to sit there and really work out the actual data models that sit between both and then be able to patch it all through.

So, I think it should try and sort that side of things out and make it a little bit more seamless, so that from a user point of view all I need to do is just this, this, this and this, and then it works. That would be a lot nicer.

There are a number of things to consider. One, you want to know that the reliability is. You need to know the software is going to do the job that you want it to do. You need to know that it's going to be fairly easy, painless to set up.

But at the same time, if you have any issues, you've got a good customer focus. That they're interested in making sure that they're going to basically get the best for the customer. So it's not just about - "we've sold you a load of products, so we'll respond to you now."

You need to spend a lot of time getting it developed. Make sure you go over areas brought into it so you can then show the value of what it can do. Once you've then got it, then you can prove to the business that this is how important it is, being able to understand your IT. What makes up your IT. Then of course, if you're trying to pass that information into other areas, like asset management or software license management, it's all feeding from the same place. So you can then at least get something which is meaningful at the end.

We can have all our requests and incidents registered in one system. We have about 250 employees in the IT department and we have one system. We don't have to email each other and we are sitting in a geographically large company, in many departments and in many hospitals. So it's great that we just have one system and we don't have to call or drive to each other. That's the most important thing.

Some years ago we were three departments and now we're just one department for the whole region. And we have different systems, so we can't communicate. With one system you have to write emails and stuff. When I make a request it's immediately reaches our technicians, so it's great.

The greatest issue for us is to understand the roadmap. We want to know whether we should upgrade now or should we wait three months. Which version should we install? It's not the project, but it's the plan for the project. So we went to a recent conference to find out because we want to know which way we should go.

After we upgraded stability is good. But with our last version it was not very good. We had lags and it was performing slowly. We tried different solutions, upgrade servers, and databases, but the performance was not very good. Then we upgraded and we haven't had those problems since. Also, previously we had the client/server system, but now we only have web clients. That also may be an explanation of the improvement in stability and performance.

We are a big company, but we also have small departments in the hospitals who have this system as well. So it is scalable.

We have a partner to HPE helping us and we also have Premium support technicians that we work with all the time and we use them a lot. The support is good. We can have help any time, so it's good.

I was in the project from the beginning. Some of the problems are from our company because they don't always decide what way we want to go. Our company wants to go one direction, and when we start they sometimes change the direction and it will complicate the solution. Sometimes, it's our own fault.
But, for the product itself, the setup is straightforward, with some issues. Sometimes the logical database structure and tables is not very easy to understand. So we need to have some help with that. It seems like it's old tradition from the old versions, going up the system. It's hard to see the logical structure of the tables.

We looked at Service Now two years ago. We stayed with HPE over Service Now because we have a suite of HPE products. We think it's easier to make the integrations into one.

We heard some other customers in Denmark have the back end as Service Manager and the front end as Service Now, as a portal to Service Manager. I don't know if it's easier to deploy in Service Manager, so I don't know. But I know some Danish companies have done it.

The workflow engine that standardizes and globalizes the process steps. It drives people through the process by standardization and automation.

Let's take request fulfillment. You are assuming the use of an iPhone or a notebook in the past. People sent around a lot of emails to somehow organize. The notebook gets ordered, delivered, installed, and so on. This is now completely organized and standardized in one workflow. And people work on one ticket. There's full transparency and there's no confusion anymore. Time to market is much faster and the email traffic is less. So, it's much better than before.

There's a lot of manual work, which is error prone and time consuming, in how the code gets transported from one system to the other. This consumes a lot of my resources that have to be available for that. So wish that it could transport much better. Which goes into the direction of DevOps and the other things that need support. Support is the real issue.

I have seen a lot of features on the road map, which will increase my rating. But my assumption would have been that, by now, we would at least half way on the road, from the features that we have been presented with until now. They should have made most of these improvements earlier. And we have permanent discussions where we compare with products like Service Now and HPE is not there.

We have just implemented Asset Manager and it seems, from an operational perspective, to be much easier. We need to use less resources in the administration, compared to Service Manager. Asset Manager looks like it's going to be a stronger product.

It runs stable. There's really no question around it. We have no issues with the stability of the system.

So far, we haven't had any issues with scalability. We have about 35,000 users. There was one issue during the upgrade, but this was fixed. In general, it's a stable system.

In general, we were not satisfied with technical support. We needed to escalate. We currently have escalation with the highest HPE management, because the support around the suite is not good, especially first level support. When you call the first level hotline, there is lot of lost time, because many questions get asked twice. And they ask simple questions. We are a big customer and at the first level they don’t even know which systems we have in use. That's really unsatisfying.

When looking for a new product, check how the user interface looks. That was the mistake that we made. We underestimated the acceptance of the end user community of the interface. And we currently use the Service Request Catalog for HPE Service Manager, which is really bad. We had big acceptance issues with our user community on that product.

The other issue is how the administration of the tool works and how many resources you really need to administrate it, to keep it running, and to keep it alive. That's something that shouldn't be underestimated.

Check how much configuration customization you can do in the system without impacting the upgrade path and increasing the upgrade effort for the system.

Approval routes for catalog items: We can now set up multiple, different approval routes and have a nice front end for the users.

The organisation can use special approval routes for different items now; previously, we could only have one approval route.

There could be some slight fixes to managing the catalog, because you can customise the items so much you can't really change the items in dropdown lists easily.

In the catalog you can have dropdowns which are managed by a list in the background. For example you could have a dropdown of pc equipment. If a new item of equipment is available you would need to add it to this list, there is no way to insert a line in the correct position, instead you need to cut and paste all entries down one line so you can fit your new line in the correct location.

I have used it for four years.

Deployment took around two years but this was due to project teams changing, HPE releasing newer versions and requirements changing! 

The stability of the product is absolutely fine; there has never been any downtime or anything that has been of any concern.

We have never had to scale the system out but cannot see any reason why this would not be OK; the system is built to handle this.

Customer service is great; the guys are really friendly and always offer knowledge to the best of their ability. They are generally quite quick to response

We used HP OpenView 4.5; we switched to Service Manager as OpenView was relatively old anyway. HPE Service Manager was the natural successor so we went with it.

Initial setup is very straightforward to get a OOTB system up and running. From there, you can see how the system is intended to work, also.

For implementation, we used a mix of HPE Partner and in-house team. The level of expertise was questionable at times but on the whole, we got the job done.

The return on investment is unquantifiable. I would have thought we have made our money back now in the way it has streamlined processes.

Make sure you can get the best price available! Always look at all options for license types. I think concurrent worked out better.

We didn't look at any other options as we wanted to continue with HPE and on-premise software, so we still had control.

Service Manager is a very versatile system that can be tailored in many ways to suit many customers' requirements.

It helped us conform with ITIL service management requirements.

I would like to see continuous improvement in the HPE SM.

The stability could be better. There are a lot of changes between versions and in the updates.

I think the scalability is good.

It was great to work with technical support.

HPE did the initial setup.

HPE is a strategic partner for doing such work. I would advise colleagues who are considered this solution to take it.

The most valuable features are the ability to track tickets, analyze incidents, and get dashboards on how the environment is performing in terms of incident management. For example, when there's network downtime, you're can track how long it takes to resolve incidents. So you can see how long it took from the time the ticket was created to escalate it if necessary, and how long it took to close it.

There's a lot of accountability now. You can hold somebody accountable for incident resolution. You are able to see when a ticket was created and when a ticket was escalated for resolution. At the end of a period (week or month), you're able to see how the environment is performing in terms of how many incidents have been created, how they've been closed, and how the teams are performing. You get meaningful reports on how teams are doing.

In the release that we currently have, the biggest challenge was reporting. It didn't have the reports that we needed out of the box. In fact, it didn’t have reports at all out of the box. It was a nightmare.

You need to use Crystal Reports to customize your reporting. In the next release, I want Service Manager to have its own reports. Straight out of the box, click a button and you get the report you want. I'm sure that with all the implementations that have been done, there must be some common reports which have been used.

We implemented it in 2014. So far, it's been good.

The product is quite stable. It is quite good.

The scalability is quite good because we've been able to integrate other products like the Business Service Management into it. From a monitoring perspective, we are now able to create tickets as incidents happen, and correlate the ticket with other incidents. So, it's quite stable and scalable. You can do a lot of stuff with it.

We have used technical support through the HPE partner, the guys we use to implement the solution; and, in some cases, through HPE itself.

Previously, we were using Siebel HelpDesk. It was not suitable for our purposes. We needed something that was ITIL based; so HPE Service Manager fit what we wanted. It is easy to use, cost effective, and ITIL based.

The installation was straightforward. Having previously used a service management tool, I’d say that usage was not so bad. Adoption is where the challenge was. Users were used to calling in with incidents, but now they need to raise tickets. That was a challenge, but it's been sorted out.

It's a good product.

I would advise colleagues to get the latest release because I’ve been told the reporting has been sorted out in this new release. I am interested in upgrading to get that. If what I'm told is true, then that's a good product.

The most valuable feature is the whole compact thing. The ticketing tool has everything in it that we need.

There are some ups and downs. On the upside, we don't need to create any very complicated integrations because it's quite compatible with all the other HPE tools which we need for our end-to-end business. On the downside, it cannot really operate in the cloud; but other than that, everything is good.

It has improved our communication between teams. The distribution of issue solutions, for example, is integrated in one application. I know there are also the databases for the solutions, the known error databases and so on, which all improve the behavior of the company because everybody knows how to solve problems.

I’m not sure what I can suggest to improve. We also got such questions from our customers; and we provided them with our contact in HPE. Not all of those requests are possible to get into the product; so we sometimes end up customizing it. For the moment, I cannot think of anything specific that I would change; but I'm sure there are multiple things that could be upgraded.

It is stable now. We are quite special. In the past, integrations were kind of complicated. We had some ups and more downs. Now that we've switched to the Windows service, it is really reliable. The application's performance reached a completely different level; so it's quite fast. Users are happy about it.

The availability of the application is not comparable to what we had in the past. We had downtime maybe once or twice a month. At the moment, we do not experience anything like that.

Over the last five years, we had a huge project which involved everybody in the company switching over from Peregrine Service Center to HPE Service Manager. That was quite a huge achievement. In the past, we were not very satisfied with it; but after we upgraded the system, everything was okay.

The quality of the support depends on the type of support. We have multiple kinds of support. Either our customers contact our operations teams via service manager to provide support for the storage service, or we have a centralized and localized support directly for the application itself. I fall into the latter type of support.

In general, we are using multiple tools from HPE. Compliance and compatibility between those tools is better if you use the same vendor.

From my point of view, the most important criterion in picking a vendor is the quality of the support. We are in a position of the customer. We have the premium support for cases when something is not functioning and we cannot make it work.

I wasn’t really involved with the initial setup. We started with the Service Manager 7.0, the version that was there 5-6 years ago. Then we had the huge upgrade to Service Manager 9.0. It was not that huge because at that time, it was only a small number of people working with it. That was the preparation for the rollout to the whole company.

The upgrade was kind of a complex process. Everything is complex. We are using our own customizations. We are not using the out-of-box stuff. Therefore, each upgrade involves something unexpected.

I was not in the company when the decision was made to choose HPE Service Manager. We have a management committee that makes those decisions.

The best solution depends on your needs. You should consider different solutions and decide which best fits your needs. Ask yourself whether HPE Service Manager can provide you what it provides us.

It's a complete service management suite; a complete management product used by the company worldwide for us. It's good. It's a full suite of processes under one tool, fully integrated with all the other HPE software products.

From an IT perspective, it improves the way my company functions because it supports all our ITIL processes, all the service management processes; best-in-class processes across the whole IT organization, which is good and important; and all components being connected under the same umbrella.

There are features that are missing and that can be improved in upcoming releases, and HPE is well aware of those. They're working on those. For example, they need to build a new portal for the end users to access, which is a kind of interface between our end users and IT. They're working on that. They need to have a portal that will be mobile friendly and all that stuff. That's coming up with a new version. It would still need improvement, but they're moving in a good direction.

We have used it for many years. With a previous version, more than five years ago, we showed some instability issues, but I know HPE put a lot of investment in the quality of the new products and the latest versions. Now, for the last 2-3 years, we haven’t had any stability issues.

It is highly scalable. We already use it on a kind of cloud architecture with several servers. We have what they call "horizontal scaling" with many servers. When we need to increase the bandwidth, we just need to provision some new VMs. It is easy to add to the cluster; so, extremely easy and scalable.

We rarely use technical support. We used it a few years ago, when we migrated from another HP product called OpenView Service Desk, which was phased out by HP, to a new one, because we had to get used to working with the new product.

For the last couple of years, we have opened very, very few support tickets. It's working fine.

As I mentioned, we were using another HP product (at that time, it was not yet HPE). It was HP OpenView Service Desk. That was their previous service management suite. When HP acquired Peregrine, with Service Center that became Service Manager, actually, they phased out Service Desk. We moved from Service Desk to Service Manager simply because of an HP – at the time, HP – decision.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Service Manager is not a simple product. It's not the kind of stuff where you download the bits, run setup and that's it. There is a lot of tuning and configuration. It's always the same: This product has a lot of configuration and customization capabilities. It's highly flexible, but on the other hand, what you have in flexibility, is also what you find in complexity.

For us, it's not an issue that it's somehow not friendly or easy, as you might imagine, but on the other hand, we can do whatever we want. That's the most important thing.

There wasn’t really a shortlist of vendors because, again, HP came to us proactively, announced the fact that Service Desk will be phased out, and indicated that all our licences, all the features, and even more would be available to us at no cost; that is, except the implementation cost, but we did that in house, so it was kind of an indirect cost. There was no cost in terms of new licences or professional services.

In general, when we’re looking at a vendor like HPE, Dell or IBM, the main criteria is integration. We’re using a lot of HPE products, and because we're using a lot of their products, we expect that we won't have to manage product A talking to product B and to product C. That is their stuff, and they need to manage that for us.

First of all, compare, for sure. We use an HPE product; we still look at other vendors and competitors. We have a long history with HP/HPE. Now, what I would also say is, wait, because in my shop, we know we are a pure customer of this software product. We know it's moving away from HPE going to another company. They say nothing will change. We'll see. I think it brings uncertainty, and they're well aware of that.

If I had a colleague or a friend of mine say to me, "I need a service management solution.", I would say, “We have a nice, wonderful solution.” Now, what it will look like in a couple of years is less clear than what I would have said last year. So, we'll see. Normally, nothing will change, but we just know the name of the new company. We don't know what the leaders will choose, even if right now, the HPE people we see say, "Nothing will change." I think that will be the case for one year, but they can't speak for 2-3 years.

No vendor is perfect. There's always improvement possible, so nobody deserves a perfect rating. Why not a lower rating? I think they're doing a good job, and they listen to customers.

It has features such as integration with Skype for Business, smart analytics, and smart ticketing. It integrates with our current proprietary system. It's provides end users with a single interface for multiple types of communication. This is how it is helping.

As a whole, it helps us to improve and automate workflows to make sure they provide the minimum guaranteed level of service, quality of service, and so on.

It's not the best trouble ticket system. We would like to have Skype for Business integration fail-over with our cluster-based solution. There are other enhancements we are waiting for and we are in touch with HPE support regarding them.

We are looking for a tool that is certified with Gartner. HPE is not the best tool for this. ServiceNow is better. We want to have more features, cloud-based solutions, and more enhancements regarding the digital service system.

Although we have never seen ServiceNow, it's been certified by Gartner, the certifying authority, so they have something that HPE doesn’t. HPE is now the third or fourth choice. It used to be second choice. So they need to be more competitive with the others and come up with better features.

We have not seen much improvement in the analytics reports interface, so that would be welcome.

Stability is quite good.

The solution is widely scalable.

Technical support is average. It takes too much time to resolve issues in relation to the competency of the technical support engineers. Every issue is elevated to the lab level. Maybe we are more competent than the HPE support or they lack knowledge. We do everything we can to identify issues and we pass them to the HPE support engineers. They ask the basic questions and then it takes 2-3 weeks for him to understand the issue. Then they escalate it to the lab and he will say that he is waiting for the lab. This is bad support.

We started 13 years ago with the original HPE Service Desk. Now, it's not an original HPE solution; HPE took over Peregrine Systems. So that’s what we use, for better or worse. But, it's quite customizable.

It's not like we just choose a solution. We follow the HPE roadmap. Whatever they deliver, we end up with it and implement it. There are times when we keep asking for some advanced features and it's a matter of time waiting for new releases. They are not that very agile incorporating the changes. They take a long time.

The setup process is very well documented. It is straightforward.

HPE also has a cloud-based solution called Service Anywhere, but we are not sure how it works. Is the functionality the same and just the platform changed, or is the functionality different in the cloud-based solution? They are also looking at the road map for Remedy. But we would rather they improve HPE Service Manager.

The product is completely integrated for our company, so it simplifies a lot. Also valuable is the ability to customize the tools, and learn to follow our process.

It is not so simple for the company. Basically, we are obliged to have an organization in order to do some development. We have a stronger requirement for our business to follow their process and the other very complex extra processes. For example, for change management, we have a very complex process, also due to all the regulators.

For me, it's a lot to follow. Previously, it was a lot to simplify the IT system. Before implementing HP service management, we had more than 10 different tools. One of the benefits was to simplify our architecture and significantly reduce the cost.

For me, we need integration with big data. I think it will be with the new version. We have to see it to be able to analyze more. In fact, we are able to look at data; but, in the end, we are currently not able to manage it. I think the new version will be much better when we have the view of big data.

It's not so easy to move to the next version. It's not quick to upgrade. It's a significant project for us.

It is becoming more and more stable. We are currently in version 9.43.

It has met our scalability requirements.

Technical support is absolutely very good.

I wasn’t involved at the very beginning of the project, but I was there just after the whole effect. It's not a technical project. It's much more of an enterprise project.

We looked into some competitors, including ServiceNow. One branch of our company bought ServiceNow. We are in an internal competition.

We chose HPE because it's a large company. We are also a business with other lines of business. It was very helpful to know that it was not only useful for that one project.

Keep it simple. Do not do a lot of customization. Keep the implementation of the tool simple.

It is a rich content solution. We use automation services on HPE.

We can use it very quickly. It's a good and complete solution, along with a lot of functionality.

The support and functionality of the portal could be improved. There was an old portal and they stopped it in the last version. Though there is a new portal, it's not really clear. It's a problem.

Stability has been fine.

We are a company of 3000 employees and we have been able to use it effectively in our company.

We had to take premium support. The standard support is not enough. Premium support is good but you have to pay more.

The integration is a little bit complex.

The user experience was great. The whole project was integration between the old version to a new version. It was better for the users and they agreed to upgrade to the new version.

We looked at ServiceNow and BMC. The reason we chose this tool was because we could not be on SaaS due to security issues. We were already using an HPE solution so it was easier for us to stay consistent.

Another reason was that ServiceNow is SaaS based and Service Manager is not.

We also looked at Service Anywhere but we could not go into a SaaS solution.
Maybe in the future, our next step would be to move to Service Anywhere within HPE.

The most valuable feature of the solution is usability. We use the tool to keep track of our incidents, technical changes and problems. It enables us to address the root cause of incidents. Also, the service request management is also valuable. It addresses all those areas for us and is pretty key for us.

Before we had Service Manager, we had a number of products from other vendors. When we implemented Service Manager, it gave us a standardized, centralized tool which we were able to leverage globally.

The things that I'm waiting for are things like better email integration, mobile-type connectivity, and an improved portal for users. The end-user experience is very key for me. At the moment, that's an area that the product's perhaps a bit weak. In terms of functionality, it does already what I need it to, generally. There are some new areas coming along that are quite exciting. Things like big-data analysis, automation. These are all things that are going to be strong, for the tool in the future. In terms of what I want right now, is a tool that's slick and usable for the end-users. All these extra things are bonus add-ons for me.

I think making it a lot easier for the user to pick up and just go with it. We want something that's more akin to the standard internet experience that users would expect today when they're looking at things like Google and Amazon.com. It's that kind of experience that we want them to move the product towards. We've got some additional add-ons that would be of interest, but they're secondary to getting the user experience right.

The product is quite stable. We're having some issues with performance, but I think it's down to the way we've implemented it rather than something specifically within the tool. It just doesn't respond as quickly as we might expect. It's not that it's terribly slow; it's just that it's not as quick as you'd want it to be. I think that some things are more to do with our implementation, because it's an on-site, on-premise install we have.

It certainly scales. We work with some very large vendors and they use the same software. So it's quite clear that organizations that are larger than us don't have any problems using it.

I personally haven't used the technical support. The team that I work with in conjunction for delivery of the tool use it. It seems to be okay for them.

We were using lots of different solutions. We were using an old, heavily customized BMC Remedy workflow-based tool, which we were quite happy with at the time. But our company was acquired by our parent company and there were other tools that were in use by that company. Plus there were other companies that were acquired. Through acquisition you end up with an array of products that are in the same space, so what we did when we put HPE Service Manager in place, is we consolidated all of our tool sets into one, and we picked HPE. We didn't have one, most important criteria to satisfy. I think we had a lot of criteria.

Initial setup can be quite complex. One of lessons that we learned is that we configured the tool to make it fit with our processes and the way we wanted to run the processes. I think it's too much work. It's a lesson to be learned that you basically need to adapt your processes to fit with how the tool works, rather than the other way around. We ended up with an overly complex configuration, which causes us pain every time we do an upgrade. We're working now to simplify that environment by removing the customizations and go back to a more out-of-the-box standard tool.

Before choosing HPE Service Manager, we were BMC Remedy customers. We were quite happy with that. Remedy would have been on our short list.

My main advice is to work with the tool the way it is and don't customize it. I guess that’s one of things we picked up that's very key, to be honest. I guess just determine where your priorities are and start working with whichever module covers them.

I like that you can actually customize it for different customers without any kind of problems. You can write some simple scripts to handle some of the workaround solutions that are not out-of-the-box. Recently, the interface has been changed; they changed all the menus.

We implemened HPE Service Manager for InterTelecom. It improves their company operation by allowing them to open incidents and new requests providing their customers with better, quicker service. They can implement SLAs and other modules that allow them to look over their problems and categorize them. This way they can filter them much easier.

The user interface was not really good, but they improved it a little bit. Last year they released a new version and now it's much better. Speed could be improved also. It depends on your setup, share version, internet connection speed, and database.

Service Manager is stable. We have more than 20 consultants implementing Service Manager and our customer, InterTelecom, has about 100 or so people using it.

Scalability is good. InterTelecom is a medium size company with many subscribers.

We are the biggest HPE partner for virtual solutions and when we open up cases, we get really good support.

InterTelecom was a consultation project. They were using Service Manager with three different incidents. We consolidated and put everything into one incident and implemented some new features.

Initial setup was complex. It took 6 or 7 consultants almost a year to finish the implementation project.

We do not use HPE Service Manager ourselves. We implement it for our customers and they use various other vendors, such as CA IT Service Management.

We suggest to our customers that they use a similar solution to Service Manager even if they use different products. But we do suggest they switch to HPE products. We think it’s worth switching over to HPE. They are a good company.

The most valuable features are using the Big Data analytics and most of its functionalities like Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management and so on.

The new feature of the separate dashboard is the most perfect function.

The Survey function that has been added is also a very important feature and all of these features play a vital role.

It manages the end user experience for handling tickets. It helps in managing the events that are found for system environments and the end user experience for utilizing the environment systems.

I need to see more enhancements in the Service Catalog module as it is a very beneficial module and it needs more enterprise development.

The product is stable. We have had no issues.

It is a totally scalable product.

The first level of support is slow and it takes some time to receive support. However, the second level and third level as well as the R&D layer are faster.

Only our sales manager had used a different solution earlier. From our perspective, we always see other tools that compete with HP Service Manager; we never fail with price.

I didn't do the setup myself but from my team’s experience, it was easy to install.

I advise others to use the HP Service Manager because it's a powerful and capable enterprise solution.

The reason for choosing this product is that it is an enterprise tool and HP is a big company that supports its product powerfully. I have started working with it since 2009 and up until now, I have used about 6 versions, i.e., from version 7 to 9.5. Since HP is a big company, it has the ability to keep growing and that is an important factor for selecting this vendor.

The missing factor in this product is that there are some processes that are not mapped to the ITIL V3. Only 11 processes are certified for the ITIL V3; another 5-6 processes are not certified. Thus, it needs more customization and development that applies to the processes in regards to this aspect. In addition to this, the support team takes a long time to reach a solution and we want a faster response.

One of the of things I like best about HPE Service Manager is while it's a solution that does work out of the box with some configuration, its real strength is its ability to change for your organization's infrastructure.

What I do with the tool, our Process Managers come to our group and say, "We're trying to do this. We're trying to enable this process. We're trying to manage this application. We're trying to do this new thing. How can your tool help?" HP Service Manager's primarily for incident problem change configuration management. When they have a new thing they need to do, my team builds Service Manager to do that new thing.

While the tool works, what makes it work better is I can make it do whatever they need. It's a completely customizable solution to fit with the specific needs of our organization. It does it really easily and really dependably. I never have to worry if the whole thing is going to break. The tool won't break because of the changes that I make to it. My specific thing might not work, that never happens. But the tool itself is not at risk or in jeopardy when we're making these changes to it. They built it with that idea of configuration in mind. I think that's really its real strength and that's where it helps me.

When we're doing a refresh of workstations, as everybody needs a new PC every two years, the team that's managing that refresh process, just says, "We want a way to open this refresh ticket. We want it auto-populated with all these specific pieces of information. We want to automatically have a reminder go out X number of days before the refresh. We want an email that can contain these pieces of information and allow the user to click yes or no to these options. Can you make that happen?" And I can. The tool doesn't do that natively but all of those things that they needed it to do it was really easy to set up for them to do all of those things. Making the PC refresh process work a lot simpler without having to come up with, "Okay, how do we build a solution for that." We just build it into something we're already using.

My big concern is that HPE made a decision in its last dot release to change the way that these improvements and enhancements are done by the end user. They went to what they call code-less, really it just means you code less. It's not really a code-less mode, you're just coding less. Their sales pitch is, they can take the control of these improvements and enhancements out of the hands of people like me and into the hands of the person who's saying, "Can you make it do whatever?"

The gap in that or the thing that makes me nervous about that is the guy who is saying, "Here is my thing." Doesn't have the picture of here's everybody else's thing and how yours is going to impact theirs. Some of the things they ask me to build are really dumb and I shouldn't build. That conversation with the development team that says, "This thing that you're trying to do doesn't really fit. Does it really make sense to do this thing?" And having that sanity check. If my end-user can build that themselves, then you don't get that level of sanity check.

As they move to what they want, I think they're trying to make it easier for the companies that are smaller companies that don't have guys like me, that don't have an expert to do the building and make it simpler for them, but in doing so they do make it a little bit more scary for the guy who is managing it for the larger organization. I want to be able to make this stable. I know that what I'm putting in isn't going to break anybody else's things. I won't step on your toes because so and so has asked me and so and so has asked me, so I'm familiar with what everybody wants.

My concern is not something I want them to do different, but as they're going in a direction that might sell well to the guy who doesn't have a guy like me on their team it actually is scary to the guy like me who says, "But how can you ensure that people are going to do it right if you're putting it into the hands of Joe user who isn't aware of that bigger picture."

Other than that, I guess the only other thing I would say is it really is an amazing tool. They have built in integrations with out of box tools and standing up integrations to brand new tools is really simple. We've custom built 64 different integrations, usually within the period of weeks. Somebody says, "I need a new way to do this." We're like, "All right, we'll stand that up." Most of the development time is their product talking to mine, because I know how to make my product work. They're still figuring out how to talk to my product. But standing up new integration points is really simple, working with other tool sets is really simple. They do a lot of things really well. I think it is awesome, and I'm surprised that more people don't think so.

Service Manager itself is stable. Every time there's a major release from the vendor we put it through its tests. But we do quarterly releases every 6-8 weeks we're implementing minor improvements and enhancements to make the processes work better and usually it's just functional testing. We never have to worry about what it's going to do to the underlying system. The user says, "Make it do X." We come up with a solution. We say, "Is this what you we're thinking of?" They say, "Yeah." We put that into production and we very rarely get any sort of negative follow-up. We've had 26-27 months without an unexpected outage.

It is built for small organizations all the way up through large organizations. We have 6,000 active users; 6,000 operators within the tool. It's a software for tracking something broken. You call into the help desk and say, "My X broke." Service Manager takes over from there, the person who's taking your information is pulling your information from Service Manager and they're putting that in the ticket and that ticket is in Service Manager, and your thing that broke is a record in Service Manager and they know all about that thing. We have, I don't know, close to 100,000-200,000 tickets a month.

Our volume is incredibly high. We have a lot of throughput of the number of tickets. Some of those are from users who've called in and said, "My X is broken." We have integration with automation and monitoring who can automatically create tickets within the tooling system. It works for a small, but we're not small we've been big the whole time.

For most of the Tech Support I'm the guy to ask. When we do ask questions we have to ask questions of HPE, and they're familiar enough with us now, but the first level support guy whose job it is is to ask the first level support questions, I get to bypass them. They send me to the third level support guys and I get to ask the interesting questions.

When dealing with HP’s technical support, the first level support teams are responsible for weeding out the simple questions. They aren’t necessarily experts in a particular tool-set like HPSM, but they are the ones with access to documentation and the ability to search through it. So the job of first level support is to ask the basic level questions – what version of HPSM are you using, what messages are in the logs, what error messages are you experiencing – etc., and then search through HP’s documentation library to find answers for those questions. For simple questions, that level of knowledge is great. But we don’t ask simple questions anymore. We’ve been working with the toolset long enough that our questions are beyond the ability of first level support.

Fortunately our support contract allows us to move quickly past that first level of support. When we get to the next levels of support, we move past the team that asks the basic questions and reads through documentation, and we get routed to the people who are (or were) developers, consultants, tool experts who have knowledge more than just what’s been documented, but who have the knowledge that comes from experience. So when we have a question that is not a simple question, we get experts who know how to assist us in figuring out the answers.

They had an old software suite called Vantive that was going out of support and starting to get too expensive. They needed to move to a more modern platform.

That's actually how I got involved. The people who deployed it did a bad job. They built it and then the consultants left. The team that was onsite was doing the best they could but there were some foundational flaws with how the deployment was done that they didn't know about. They were looking for an expert, someone who knew the tool, who could come in and sort of help them fix some of those issues and they hired me over the phone because I fixed one over the phone.

They're like, "It's always slow when we do this thing." I said, "Well, have you checked here. There's an out of the box function that's really a sales pitch function, that as soon as you have a 1,000 records it starts to slow down." Like, "No, yes we do have that enabled. Let's turn that off." As soon as they did that on the phone, they were like, "Can you come work for us." No, I wasn't part of the initial deployment but have been there every year but the first. I solved the problem over the phone. He hadn't met me in real life, in that two hour phone conversation he said, "We want to hire you. Do you want to move out from Minnesota to New Jersey and take the job?"

They had looked at a couple of other ones: BMC's Remedy, HPE Service Manager and then a third one. Remedy actually came in first in their reviews, they liked Remedy better but the license and support was more expensive.

Service Manager's big competitor is ServiceNow. It's a hosted solution in competition with HPE Service Anywhere. HPE has a hosted solution. People think ServiceNow is the be all end all. The reason they think that is simply because the user interface is really pretty. They think because the user interface is really pretty, the underlying stuff is working as well.

A couple years ago we looked at moving away from Service Manager into ServiceNow. The more we dug into ServiceNow the less we liked ServiceNow. While the UI is pretty, all the things that they swear are better, when we were testing it out and actually walked through some actual real life scenarios, didn't gain us anything. It was slower than what we were doing in HP Service Manager. They were like it's upgrade proof and you don't have to worry about any of your code breaking. We had code breaking. They are like, the upgrades are simple and experiences no outage. We experienced outage every time they did an upgrade. The hosted solution where someone else is taking care of it for you didn't really work.

We kept it in-house and we kept Service Manager because we wanted to be able to have that control. We wanted to know what the impact was going to be. We wanted to have our hands on because then if anything went wrong it's on-us. Because of that we have made sure everything's gone smoothly because it's on-us. As people are looking at their solutions as your looking at Service Manager compared to ServiceNow look at what you can configure and customize in HPSM compared to what you can do in ServiceNow. Look at the true cost of ServiceNow compared to their sales pitch of that costs. Look at what you can actually do with the tool set verses what they'll sell you with the tool set. Remember that the prettiness of the UI, it can look like a beautiful car but if it doesn't get you down the street it's not really a good car. It will look good in the driveway but it's lousy to drive.

Their fallback was this, and it wasn't like, "Oh, we didn't want HPSM." They analyzed three and this was number two. BMC and HPE Service Manager tend to flip back and forth between who's the best depending on what year. It wasn't like, "Oh, I guess we'll have to have Service Manager." It was, "Okay, that was more expensive then we want to pay. We're happy to go with HPSM."

It allows us to manage all of our incidents and requests in a single location where we have multiple applications previously.

It allows us to perform better tracking, especially manpower, and then tracking incidents and things back to particular configuration items.

It could have better user control of the user interface. You have to either sacrifice seeing what you can see or having to scroll a lot, one of the two.

It's been pretty stable.

It hasn't been an issue. We're fairly small, so it doesn't need to scale much.

We've always had good experience with tech support.

There's a lot of features we're not using currently, some of which we're thinking about using. There's just a lot to it, a lot more than we really need in most of our cases right now.

Definitely check in with Packard App. There's a lot of good software applications that they provide. They've got a good integration with their hardware. Overall, HP will just give you a really great solution.

The general integrated service desk incident, the customization, the work flow and the knowledge management. We've got limited deployment in change and almost none in the service request fulfillment.

We mostly use it as a platform for our service desk to streamline and optimize. We've done a lot of wraparounds the core product: adding chat and adding other features that aren't in the core product. The base core product does what we need it to do.

In the next version I'd like to see end user surveys, and have it much more robustly meet our large enterprise needs. We'd like to retire our home grown solution.

We still find ourselves wrapping customizations around it more than we would like, and we still find the upgrade path more costly and time consuming than we would hope. We spend a lot of time on platform support, the patching, the care and feeding of the whole entire platform.

It's been relatively stable. We don't have much in the way of downtime with it.

Scaling is always a challenge for us because we're so huge. Generally it does the job though.

We're heavy users all the time. It's not one of the tools that we've got the advanced option for the TAM and all of that. It's been a much more successful implementation than some of our other tools.

It was long and complex, but it generally worked.

We did a large RFP bake-off between multiple vendors for large integrated suites doing processes, automation, and monitoring. We selected HPE due to the breadth of their tools, particularly in the monitoring and automation spaces. Service Manager was one of 49 products we purchased at the same time. It wasn't targeted explicitly for itself. It was more because of the breadth of tools from a single vendor.

It's a good solid product. We're not unhappy with it. We're not overjoyed with it, and we're big time looking at Service Anywhere and other SaaS solutions for that space as opposed to internally hosted. We brought it in in the late 2000s and it served us well. We're approaching 2017 and we're looking at what we can do much more cloud based.

The flexibility and the integrity of the product. It allows me to have a rock-solid platform for change, problem, and incident control.

It's been in place for many years, and it's given us a platform that we can rely on for audit and for change. We know it's always going to be there.

The licensing model could be made more flexible. Some of the reporting capabilities could be adapted for some of the modern reporting tools.

Very stable.

It's salable for a price.

I haven't had to use it very often but when I have it's adequate.

I know there are competitors out there that have a little more flexibility and a little more ease of implementation. For what we use it for, it's good.

Look at everything out there. Think about how you're going to grow in the future, because that's going to certainly impact the cost of the product.

The GUI interface portion of it is easy to use but when I have to revert to the non-GUI portion, it's very slow. It's very cumbersome.

We use it for the change management tool. All of our ticketing for the help desk, things like that, are put through the tool. You can call up the record on the issues that you have and report on it in Service Manager. They send the tickets to the appropriate departments who can resolve the issues.

Room for improvement is the speed with which you're able to access it and where it isn't as slow and draggy. It is really draggy.

Stability is great.

There's no problems there.

I've never had to contact them.

I didn't have a decision in that. That was made by the change management organization. They wanted to switch. They wanted something that could be interfaced with mobile phones that could send the approval notifications to the mobile phones or so the IM tickets could be sent to the mobile phones. I get them on my phone now. So that I can respond to those is it's an emergency and I can take care of them right away and I don't have to wait till I get back to the office or to a PC. I think that had a large interface in why they bought the product.

The GUI interface portion was very straightforward. The few little glitchy things that you had to figure out. But other than that it was very easy to use. On the non-GUI portion it's a little more cumbersome and complicated.

The interface is good, I like it. It's easy to use. It's intuitive and it does go to the mobile app for verification and approvals and it's easy to use on the mobile app. Just make sure that the PCs that are going to run the non-graphic interface have a fast processor because if they don't it's very time consuming to use.

Process Designer allows us to make modifications to certain attributes with the confidence that they will be forward compatible with new versions.

Improved rigor around Change Management workflows has led to increased operational stability. In turn, this means fewer High Severity Incidents, which is another Key Performance Indicator for us.

Authentication needs to natively support multiple AD forests, since this is typically an enterprise tool with global users.

HP iterations - over 10 years

SM 9.3.3 - since Dec 2014

Yes. Upon initial deployment, we did not correctly set up the license containers, which resulted in our floating licenses being active in the system but not available. The issue took some time to identify and fix, resulting in a false start in production.

Yes. In addition to the fat client used by system administrators and support, we rolled out a web client for the general user base. Load balancers were not delivered in Phase 1 (time/cost constraints), and that caused negative user experiences.

Not so far, but our user model to date has been relatively consistent. Growth in recent years has been driven outside of North America, meaning we have substantially more users and traffic, but it is spread over 24 hours.

Our customer-vendor relationship is solid. We get the responses we need to stay productive. From a product perspective, we would like to get more traction of shaping the enhancements in future releases. A large part of that is ensuring we stay current.

From a professional service perspective, it's excellent. We partner with HP to support the entire application suite. Anything they cannot resolve is escalated to product support.

Prior to SM 9.3.3, we had various iterations of SC (most recently 6.2.7) for approximately 10 years. Before that, we had a series of internal processes in place.

Our approach was to install the entire suite globally at one time. This was aggressive and complex, but in hindsight the right choice. There were a great deal of challenges with user adoption, but delivering everything at once eliminated a lot of potential data issues and future integrations/conversions.

Implementation was via vendor engagement for the core team, partnering with our dedicated HP support team (we outsourced support in 2011). Their expertise is solid, and, of course, should they run into challenges, they have direct access to HP product at their fingertips.

The true benefit of HP Service Manager is beyond the modules in the basic package. Leveraging Universal Discovery to create a concrete foundation in the uCMDB allows processes to deliver maximum value.

Like anything else, shop around. The beauty of HP's model is the concurrent licensing that they offer. This allows you to build a common foundation for a large audience without feeling every single seat needs to be justified.

Yes. Starting with industry evaluations such as Gartner, we shortlisted three vendors (HP, BMC & SNOW), who came in with proposals around product, pricing, deployment, etc. HP won out based on a combination of factors.

I think it's fair to say it is a workhorse. It's extremely reliable, relatively cost effective, scalable, and has good existing integration points.

The fact that it's highly customizable is the most valuable feature for us. We can change it to suit our business needs. It's also really intuitive and easy to use.

It's seamlessly integrated across our business. It's multi-user, but we can tailor it to each individual user as well as make sure that each user group gets exactly what they need. In this way, it brings our business units together.

We have a rather old version, so naturally there have been improvements to the latest versions. The issues we have with web-based access, user-based knowledge access, etc. have already been resolved, I think. I'll know it when we eventually upgrade.

It deploys just fine for us.

We're coming to end-of-life on the product we've got. We're going to replace it soon.

We're not a massive organization. We don't needs hundreds and hundreds of people in Service Manager. So right now, it suits our needs perfectly.

Technical support is excellent. They really bend over backwards for us. We have access to demos and they suggest ways to do things. They're absolutely brilliant.

We're currently looking at the Big 4 vendors: ServiceNow, BMC, IBM, and HP. As we're already an HP customer, HP has a clear advantage.

It gives me all the components I need to support my enterprise. It provides me with instant problem change, knowledge, configurations, and, specifically, gives me the functions to perform a good service test.

We've been able to come from a base of 27% to maintaining an average of about 92% every month. We improved our service levels and have been able to maintain them for the last four and a half years.

It needs to be a lot more flexible, a lot more user friendly, and a lot lighter, not so heavy. If it were lighter, it would react a lot quicker and take less of a toll on CPU resources.

We've used it for four-and-a-half years.

It’s a bit of a beast to manage, so I'd give it 3/5.

The stability is magnificent. The availability of the system and its stability is perfect. I have no issues with it whatsoever.

My technical support comes through my technical partner, and I rate them extremely highly. Without them I would be dead in the water.

No, I didn't evaluate other options.

• It integrates well with multiple Management Information Bases (MIB's).
• It can detect the Cisco switch backplane's latest condition

• It detects abnormal network traffic -- even from a PC network interface card
• It provides us with many types of logs with hundreds of thousands of log entries

It's not user friendly (too complex), and it gives limited guidance documentation of how to filter all the logs detected. We struggle with filtering over 50 types of logs with more than 200,000 lines of log information.

It can detect the Cisco switch backplane's latest condition, but I'm unable to find any documentation to provide me the value insight of these logs, hence reducing the power of risk management for my customers' network environments.

We implemented it around 2008.

It takes around 24 hours to detect all the network equipment & VLANs. If any of the network equipment or VLANs are missing from the finished network topology, you need to delete the whole topology, reset the system, and scan again.

We previously used a very old version Solarwind, which could only detect CPU & memory. The main purpose for the upgrade project, was due to a broadcast storm occuring with my previous customer.

It took my HPOV classmate and a team of more than 10 people to implement this product, and it has lasted less than four years due to a lack of research of their requirements. Due to the complexity (depending on your project scope, implementation can take around two months to finalize all the needed settings.

We used some very skilful vendors (two freelancers, and a wiring company). The vendors were HP NNI for the server, and HP PI for the manual setup – (including reporting), then the wiring company

There are three types of licenses, so make sure the license you select fits into your project scope. It took ove two weeks to verify the licenses, but it has lasted with my customer for more than six years.

• Flexibility
• Scalability

This is our “go-to” application for all ITIL processes globally. All service desks and backline teams utilize this tool from a work intake and incident management perspective. Due to its flexibility, it allowed us to come together globally on our IT business processes.

The tool is constantly improving and has been able to meet our business needs for the most part.

I've been using it for nine years.

Recently, we wanted to deploy the application across multiple data centers, but with the multi-cast restriction, we weren’t able to do it. They are working on a TCP based communication which should remove this restriction.

Stability was a major issue in older versions of the product. As the product has matured, the stability has improved. It is a Java-based tool that utilizes Jgroups for communication across the servlets. Proper tuning is needed to stabilize the Java servlets and avoid 'Out of Memory' errors.

Scalability has not been a big issue. The only complexity comes from the amount of Web clients needed to support a large implementation. Maintaining them, doing certificates for SSL if necessary and troubleshooting them at an individual level can get complicated.

Customer service is good in the fact that they are friendly and want to help, and they do follow up on issues.

Their front line support is poor. They do not have real experience so most issues will take a week or more to address and normally requires their second or third level support, or even their R&D Team. Premier Support is highly recommended if you can afford it.

No previous solution was used.

It was complex due to the company still defining the processes as they were implementing the tool.

In-house implementation was done.

Have a firm grasp on your business processes and how you’d like to see them implemented.

It was easy to implement, as we currently have many HP solutions.

The integrated nature of the solution, from a service desk perspective, because we had so many other HP products, was easy to deploy. It was best that all our products could talk to each other without more strenuous challenges.

Part of the problem they’re facing right now is they’re behind the curve in SaaS offerings. Part of our reason for moving away from Service Manager is that HP was not on the leading edge of the technology and was consequently being surpassed by SaaS offerings. They’re offering one now, but I think it’s too quick to market and not all bugs have been worked out.

HP products generally have always been stable, and this is no different. I’ve been an HP user for 20+ years, so I definitely support their stability.

It's a very scalable product, as with all HP's other products.

On the development suite, technical support was very strong. On the user side, not quite as strong.

We own a number of other HP products that are related to Service Manager, I was brought on to deploy this package.

Complexities have more to do with our company’s internal environments, meaning that we have a third party management service that manages our desk environment, and so we needed to communicate with that system.

We also looked at CA, IBM, and Service Now. At the time, I felt HP was the stronger product. I felt that they were investing heavily in the product's future capabilities.

I considered the integration capabilities, that is, being able to integrate the suite of HP tools to already existing tools (in this case, also HP (SiteScope, AssetManager, BSM, etc.)). I was not involved in the initial purchase by Dignity Health, but I know price was important, so I assume it was also important when choosing HP.

Part of the challenge for any organization is the scale with which you intend to use any solution. This means that for larger organizations using Service Manager, HP could scale no matter what the demand was. However, many products are limited in their ability to scale. When looking at software, I think scalability should be important. If you can’t find that, walk away.

Also, they have a very poor follow-up. The technology itself isn’t very bad, but HP's lack of follow-up by its sales organizations has driven me the other direction. Not a single sales person followed up when I mentioned this a year ago. But, I still use the other tools pretty extensively and I intend to expand on them. I am, however, looking at a new service desk solution.

One of the big benefits that’s come out of this is a centralized view of all IT operations that really enable us to shift resources (people and money) in a real-time way to accomplish whatever we need.

If our company has availability issues or we need faster project timelines, or whatever our business need is at the time, this solution is able to allow us to shift our needs properly.

In the next release, I would like to see easier integration with the other tool sets, such as UCCB, business service management, etc.

Extremely stable – I have one person that manages all of it and it’s totally fine.

Once you get the reference architecture, you just have to add people and the same product.

We don’t have that many problems, but when we do have one, as long as we escalate effectively, it gets resolved in a timely fashion.

We bought every product HP offered back in 2007 when the Intel craze was sweeping the IT industry. We were running BMC Magic Solution before.

The product is easy to set up to operate the way the software was designed. However, our IT shop wanted to operate a legacy mode, so we had to re-train our team to learn how to use the software the way it was intended to be used as designed by HP.

BMC and CA. We chose HP because their functionality seemed to be fairly better, their product offering seemed to touch every area of our company’s needs, and we wanted to integrate it completely into our business.

We wanted to align with Intel, we wanted them to be a cloud offering, and we also needed a technology market leader that could offer diverse set of offerings. So for us, we wanted to invest in one company that could service all of our needs across the board.

We will upgrade to 9.40 before the end of the summer, but there are still some adoption issues. We struggle with and the simplicity of getting reporting data at a high level, and output is not where it needs to be for us. But as far as having an easily supportable and deployable product, it’s really changed the work we manage IT in the company.

Call HP, call BMC, call CA, call Service Now. Be skeptical of the guys that say “we can do whatever you want”. Partner with somebody that has a vision of how IT service management is supposed to work and shift your business in that direction.

Customization of SD, IM, PM, CM modules, general behaviour.

7-8 years

All the time, sadly.

Same, it wasn't always stable. Actually, I wouldn't call it stable now either.

Hmm, let's see. That functions pretty well...

Now, this is the point where I could write some serious stories about how HP failed to help us.

Nope, I'm all HPSM.

Fast, responsive and modern design. It's used throughout the company and is a very valuable asset.

Teams can collaborate with each other in a more dynamic and responsive way.

Bring in new requested features to give the product a faster development cycle, ahead of the game!

1 year

We encountered no major issues with deployment at all.

Stability has been above average. 

The ability to properly follow ITIL v3, from interaction thru request, catalogue, problem and change.

It has an intuitive front end which allows us to roll out good customer end user experiences.

In its current iteration, around 3 years.

No, I have been using HP ITSM solutions now for 13 years.

My only concern is the flexibility of the product in smaller environments. HP do recommend people use their Service Anywhere product for SMEs. Unfortunately the nature of some businesses and agencies is that this isn't possible and they insist on their own in-house tool.

The integration between HP tools.

• Stricter process implementation
• Better performance

Over 10 years

No

Stability was always an issue untill we did a full load and performance test, since then this is in good shape.

No

Great! 8 out of 10

Good, 7 out of 10

Service Center ran out of support, so we had to switch.

It was complex due to the organization's size, complex customers and a lot of dependencies with interfaces internal and external.

In house team

Stability, lower operation costs, and straight process implementation.